A good Omen

HP’s re­freshed ver­sion of this gam­ing work­horse of­fers a well-bal­anced com­bi­na­tion of power and porta­bil­ity, writes Balqis Lim

OMEN by HP was in­tro­duced in 2015 as the com­pany’s main lap­top for the gam­ing mar­ket. Since then, it has been get­ting a few up­dates to meet the ever-chal­leng­ing de­mands of gamers. This 2018 re­freshed ver­sion is the fourth gen­er­a­tion of this gam­ing lap­top.

Ac­cord­ing to HP, It meets all the needs of gamers — with im­proved hard­ware and fea­tures that they want.

The Omen now has a slimmed-down de­sign which is the new­est gam­ing lap­top trend. It bosts thin­ner bezels and the NVIDIA Max-Q that al­lows for the sup­port of pow­er­ful graph­ics pro­cess­ing units.

DE­SIGN

I re­ally like the look of the top of the case. It sports brushed metal in the mid­dle while on the side it has a cool graphite tex­ture. The black-and-red aes­thet­ics screams gam­ing!

The lap­top is made of mostly premium plas­tic and it feels sturdy. It is also light and por­ta­ble.

The way HP po­si­tions the ports on this lap­top is in­ter­est­ing and prac­ti­cal. The Omen has ports on the right, left and at its rear.

On the left side of the lap­top are the USB Type-A port, mi­cro­phone, head­set jack and an SD card reader which makes trans­fer­ring files a breeze.

On the right, there is an­other Type-A USB port and a power con­nec­tor.

Mean­while, at the back, you’ll see the ma­jor­ity of the ports — Eth­er­net, a USB Type-A port, HDMI 2.0, mini dis­play and USB Type-C. Their lo­ca­tion at the back makes for good ca­ble man­age­ment.

The ven­ti­la­tion parts are placed at the bot­tom of the lap­top. There are two big in­take fans on the left and right side. The air is vented out to the back of the lap­top so the heat is pushed away from you, and this is es­pe­cially good for a gam­ing lap­top be­cause you do not want hot air hit­ting your hands.

PER­FOR­MANCE

Sport­ing a 15.6-inch Full HD IPS with antiglare screen, the Omen fea­tures a nar­row bezel 1080p dis­play as well as a G-SYNC op­tion.

I have no com­plaints on the colour com­po­si­tion — it’s re­ally im­pres­sive whether in dim or brightly-lit en­vi­ron­ments.

An­other great fea­ture is the full key­board with nu­meric key­pad. It feels very com­fort­able to type or even for work.

The back­lit key­board fea­tures four zones of RGB light­ing which can bey cus­tomised from 18 colours.